How Much Does a Content Strategist Cost?

Towards the end of July 2010, we asked content strategists to complete an anonymous survey about their day rates. We’d like to thank all 42 people who replied and made the results in this post possible.

Most of the survey respondents (32 people) charge $USD, which makes this currency the most interesting to analyze. We’ll also take a quick look at £UK and €EUR, though the few data points (5 and 3, respectively) for these currencies suggests you should treat the results accordingly.

Note that some content strategists charge by the hour; these were converted to day rates with an assumed 7.5 working hours per day.

The day rate ranges in $USD, grouped by years of experience, is shown in the graph below.

Across all experience and $USD day rates, the mean average is $939, the mode average is $1,000 and the median average is $640. When grouping by experience, those with under 5 years command a mean/median rate of $518/$490, and those with 10+ years command a mean/median rate of $1330/$800. (Here’s the difference between mean, median and mode, if you need it.)

Looking at the UK data, we need to use slightly different groupings because of the fewer data points. Here, we have three rates for content strategists of between 3 and 6 years, that charge a mean average day rate of £300. The two data points for 10-15 years experience produce a mean average of £852.

In Euros, we have a single result for under 5 years experience (€350) and two data points for 10-15 years experience, that produce a mean average of €700.

Finally, we received a single response for $Canadian ($400, 10+ years experience) and South African Rand (R2100, 5-10 years experience).

Dan, this is super interesting. In terms of contextualizing experience, I’m assuming this is not necessarily 10-years under the specific “content strategist” title, but content strategy relevant experience—e.g., work as a UX designer, managing editor, etc. Can you comment?

I’m not sure there’s been anyone out there consecutively calling themselves a content strategist for that long — maybe there’s an award we could give out — but I’ve been doing this work, in growing degrees of sophistication, since 1996. I think there are a number of other folks like me in this group. I’ve had any number of titles in my career, but I will say that content strategist is the one that fits the best.